#here's the thing i've been vagueblogging about for months

[jawsthatbiteandclawsthatcatch]

LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU PUBLISH CARRIGAN STUFF. I WANT TO READ THE CARRIGAN STUFF.

OH GOD OK AUAUGHGHH

Actually. I think you asked me for a summary of her Deal several months ago. And, uh, I know it's taken forever, but here you go!

…This will get a bit complicated, but I'll start with the original incarnation.

Carrigan Grimm is, mechanically, a lv 14 pathfinder 2e forensic medicine investigator with the medic archetype + a smattering of rogue / thaumaturge. So, she's extremely good at healing, knowing things, investigating, sneaking, and finding weak points. Overall, she is "a prickly perfectionist with self-loathing issues up to her eyeballs. She's convinced that no one will like her, so she pushes them away to preempt the rejection. She loves the thrill of a medical challenge or the hunt for a monster, and has some distinct mad scientist tendencies, but they're more or less held in check by a deep sense of decency." (thanks, rp partner!)

Carrigan grew up in a city not-so-secretly ruled by aristocratic vampires, and was a normal human working in forensic science, specializing in autopsies. A body she was working on turned out to be not fully dead yet -- unbeknownst to her, he was in the process of becoming a vampire -- and his bite somehow turned her into a dhampir. After frantically trying to reverse it by self-amputating the fingers that were wounded in the attack, she had to face that she had become a dhampir permanently, and was closer than ever to the creatures that she loathed. She spent the next several years isolating herself, getting by as a back-alley doctor in the city's slums and drowning in self-hatred, until the day when an acquaintance asked her to look into the disappearance of a friend.

(begin campaign 1.)

Within a few months, she had honed her skills as a combat medic, killed a lot of bogeys, saved all the children of her city, and lost a close friend. She had also joined a secret order of vampire hunters called Lantern Hunters, who fight with magically summoned lantern-shaped flails that are specially suited to destroying vampires.

Carrigan didn't hate the work, and didn't hate the people she was working with, either. So, after the mission, she kept looking for new challenges and new mysteries to solve, new people to help -- anything to keep her moving.

(end campaign 1.)

Shortly after, the country was plunged into a civil war. She fought alongside the Lantern Hunters, against her homeland, at first, but got fed up with their reckless tactics and left to go monster hunting in the countryside with one of her companions for the next several years. It ended up being for the best, because the tide of the war eventually turned, and the Lantern Hunters themselves were hunted into near extinction.

(begin campaign 2.)

Fifteen years after her original mission, she was given a new one: find a dangerous artifact before it fell into the wrong hands. She spent months in enemy territory, found the artifact, had the artifact stolen by someone she thought of as a close friend, and ended up getting trapped in a city undergoing a diabolic invasion, where she and her companions spearheaded its liberation. For their deeds, they were given the opportunity to participate in the peace talks that ended the civil war, and offered roles on the Council that would replace the vampire aristocracy. Of the three, only Carrigan accepted, committing to spend two years in office.

(end campaign 2.)

At this point, she made the very difficult decision to leave the Lantern Hunters. Although they had given her purpose at a time in her life when she truly needed it, she knew that her new high-profile job could put the remaining members in significant danger, and, well… she no longer truly agreed with their ideology that all vampires deserved to be destroyed because they're vampires. Most of the vampires she'd met had been awful, wretched creatures that deserved to die, true -- but it was because of who they were as people. Vampirism had just given them the opportunity to become the monsters they had always wanted to be.

Close to the end of her council term, she was summoned by a mysterious figure for an unexpected mission -- investigate some small-town disappearances and deal with the malevolent force causing them. She was expecting familiar faces when she went to meet her companions, but there was an unexpected newcomer, sent by one of her fellow council members -- Victor, a young vampire who… shockingly, still seemed to have somewhat of a conscience, and a personality rather than a god complex.

She found him fascinating.

(In the meta, we decided to run a Halloween one-shot preview for the 3rd campaign featuring these characters, and invited another player to join us. They brought Victor, and what was planned to be a one-shot turned into a three-parter with a 12k word text rp thread.)

An explanation of Victor will come in another post.

After that mission, Carrigan and Victor were uncertain they would get to work together again, but they crossed paths and got to know each other enough that when the mysterious figure that had caused them to meet in the first place sent out a new summons for an important mission, he invited Victor directly, on the condition that Carrigan would share the blame for any potential problems arising from his involvement.

Meta story short, from there the game went on a ~ten-month hiatus where we switched campaigns to a prewritten adventure with different characters. Victor's player and I were desperate to keep RPing with these two dorks, but couldn't without making things unfair for the other players in the game.

So, we decided to switch to an alternate universe.

Victor started as the player character in my rp partner's playthrough of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, which they had a lot of fic for. I converted Carrigan (Alexandria) Grimm into a character that would fit in that world.

Alex Carrigan is a forensic pathologist from London who had, a couple months prior to the start of the rp, been attacked by what she was pretty sure was a vampire -- but all the evidence of the attack had disappeared, leaving her to appear completely delusional as she desperately tried to convey that he was still out there and still a danger to people. She lost two fingers and spent a month being involuntarily hospitalized for her "delusions," eventually starting to wonder if the attack may not have happened as she remembered it. Possibly worst of all, throughout the experience, she received no support from any of her former colleagues or the people she thought were her friends. So, the moment she was free, she bought a plane ticket for Los Angeles, with the intent of not looking back for as long as she could manage.

A month later, walking to the bar, she found a broken, bleeding body lying in an alleyway, and begrudgingly decided to take him home and patch him up as best she could, rather than potentially bankrupting him by calling an ambulance. Within a few minutes, though, his heart stopped -- but he didn't lose consciousness or seem at all concerned when she brought it up.

And that was how she met Victor and begrudgingly joined the Masquerade.

In the months since, they've gotten to know each other, fought fleshwarp monsters in the sewers together, defeated a powerful fleshcrafting vampire, and become best friends.

Alex has gotten a (highly illegal) job at a shady clinic, unwillingly become a ghoul (a semi-thralled superhuman who drank a vampire's blood), adopted a cat, and lost her appendix.

It means everything to Victor that he finally has a friend, and he's terrified of losing her. He has also started working at a local theatre and is starting to get to know his new coworkers. Surely nothing weird or supernatural will happen with them.

[epersonae]

I wrote this originally as a reblog of something else, but after letting it sit in drafts for a while realized it needed to be its own thing. (but do go read that post, it was what got me thinking in this specific direction) I have not edited it much, other than to remove some intro about the kind of shitty day(s) I was having in my non-online life that were part of why I wrote something and then sat on it.

I have been thinking about

Don't like, don't read

(I saw this with rainbow text, and I asked how the fuck to do that, and frankly I don't have that level of patience, so just imagine it rainbow I guess)

And..........

Sure? We're all just here to have a good time or whatever, and Just Like Stuff, and it's exhausting being a hater (but also [stares at people I know who I've seen say all that and who are also ABSOLUTELY haters in private])

But I want something more nuanced than that. I mean that as both:

a writer of things I know other people have taken issue with (including, I remembered today, something that I heard secondhand about, in addition to the vagueblogging I've mentioned in an earlier post about my older fic)

and a reader/art appreciator who has some issues with things I've tried to read and art I've seen.

I don't what it is or how it works or how to get from here to there. I don't even really know how to do this with people I'm close to! (with the exception of having been a thoroughly obnoxious beta constantly saying "make me believe this could even happen", or pointing out conflicts with canon or whatever) I tend to silently nope out and then change my opinion of the person without ever telling them, because yeah, I'm horrifically conflict averse.

Which is why this might sit in my drafts for a long time.

And then, outside of friendships, and Difficult Conversations or whatever

I don't like pile-ons. I don't like a couple of people trying to articulate what bugs them about a piece of writing, and maybe being awkward or clumsy about it, and immediately getting drowned out by "you're being mean to my friends". (and I say that as someone who has had friends' writing receive this sort of critique! Multiple friends!) Maybe the immediate answer is, yes, the back button, but it has to be possible to dissect what's bothering you about a piece of writing (or a trope, or a ship) without it being negativity or an attack.

Here, I'll go first, because these are two things in OFMD fic that bug me endlessly, that writers I like have written, and I think they exhibit a subversion of the source material that is counter to the actual themes of the show.

Note: since I wrote all of this, I have written a little bit about my sort of complicated feelings about a fic that imho is an original novel in a trenchcoat, a sort of fic lacroix despite being very good. these examples are in the same vein as that.

Inevitable fucking disclaimer: I don't think people are wrong or bad for doing these things, I'm not going to try to make anybody stop, I practice don't like don't read (and I have some exceptions that I've enjoyed despite it being something I don't like generally)

Enemies to lovers: the whole point of Ed and Stede is that they click perfectly and immediately. They like each other! From the very first minute it's friendship and mutual admiration and delight and attraction. Enemies to lovers is a cliche that belongs to a different story entirely. I wish people would think more before jumping to that trope. (I've had an AU in my head for months that I absolutely cannot write until I solve this problem from the AU's source material) It's an interesting question to me, actually, why it seems to be so easy to write characters who don't like each other and then somehow fall in love, when the source material shows them liking each other SO MUCH right away.

Younger than middle aged: again, the whole point is that they are changing their lives, that their midlife crises brings them to the point where they can find love. I think it's a djenks Themes and Motifs thing, to have a story about getting to this point in your life and really looking at it and going "am I where I need to be?" Also it's incredibly unique and special to me after the last few years of my own rolling midlife crisis. (petty thought that I have sometimes: it is a failure of imagination about or knowledge of actual middle-aged people) Tbh, this goes double for age difference, I will nope out of that even faster than both of them being young.

And I think there's something about being able to not like something and still not be a dick about it, to know enough about what you do like to look at something and say "this doesn't work for me and here's why", to engage thoughtfully and critically (and yeah occasionally in public) while still having respect for the other person.

I am thinking also of @emi--rose and @frommybookbook and music, and their efforts to find kpop and Taylor Swift, respectively, that I might enjoy, because I don't like most of either, and I think this thing we've been doing is helping all three of us understand more about what we all do and don't like.

[pausing to think]

It occurs to me, also, that I spent a lot of time griping while editing for the benefit of all the broken hearts, about having to go back and do a lot of set up/rewriting to make some of what happens in that read plausibly. And I was soooooo bitchy about it and also that critique was all correct and it made the story stronger even aside from making it more "canonical", whatever the fuck that means in that particular setting.

And that was in the particular creative intimacy setting of working with a beta, which is different, admittedly, from random critique on the open internet.

But then I spent a while, back in the day, immersed in the TAZ questions of "is Lucretia a lesbian?" and "can Magnus ever love again?" and I wrote my rarepair (and associated polycule shipping) very much from my id, and a certain amount of "you can't tell me that didn't happen" that was based on overidentification and personal experience, but there were definitely people who were pretty publicly "ew" about it, and I had to think through my position, and both decide what felt true about and also decide to write from my weird heart, but not blindly.

Idk, I've written all of this and I'm just landing on

I think introspection is nice.

I think it's good to do, I think it's worth thinking about what you like and don't like, and maybe where that comes from, and not in a puriteen way but with sincerity and curiosity. I would like to support and encourage that spirit of artistic introspection.